The present invention relates to a system and a method for providing electronic vouchers via the Internet that can be used towards the purchase of products. As used herein, the terms “product” and “products” refer to goods and not services unless specified.
The Internet has become a powerful commercial resource, providing significant opportunities for the marketing, advertising, and promotion of products to a worldwide audience. On-line marketing, advertising, and promotion are increasingly important in today's competitive marketplace. However, the Internet, like any other medium, has inherent advantages and disadvantages.
Some of the disadvantages stem from using the Internet to market, advertise, and promote products that are sold through various distribution systems. For example, in a simple version of a product distribution system there is a producer. As used herein, a producer is an entity that is identified as the source of a good and/or service. The producer may be the manufacturer of a good, it may employ a contract manufacturer to actually make its goods, or it can be the provider of a service. The producer has a distribution system which includes numerous resellers who sell the product of the producer. Finally there are buyers who purchase the product of the producer from the resellers. In actuality, product distribution systems may be much more complex than that described above having many levels of resellers and buyers within the system. However, the disadvantages inherent in using the Internet for the marketing, advertising, and promotion of products of a producer are inherent no matter the level of complexity of the distribution system.
One disadvantage is that many, if not most, websites devoted to marketing, advertising, and promoting products that are sold through a distribution system are informational in nature, and fail to provide specific incentives to encourage prospective buyers to make a purchase decision. To encourage such purchases, the buyer must be motivated to purchase the products. For example, providing buyers with favorable prices for the producer's products is typically a prime motivator in stimulating a purchase, whereas providing the buyer with the retail or “Suggested-List” price for a product is not typically a strong purchase motivator. However, in many if not most situations, a producer marketing, advertising, or promoting products that are sold through resellers over the Internet cannot promote a price other than a “Suggested-List” price. If they were to promote a specific price, producers could undermine independent pricing strategies created by their resellers or affect their own pricing structure.
A further disadvantage is encountered when the distribution system of the producer assigns geographic areas (“territories”) to each reseller. In these types of systems, each reseller is given primary responsibility for the market within their territory and typically spends much time and money advertising, marketing, and promoting the producer's product with their assigned territory. In this type of distribution system, in addition to not being able to promote a selling price over the Internet as stated above, a producer cannot typically provide any type of global discount or incentive voucher to buyers without some type of restriction as to where the buyer can redeem the voucher. If a producers were to provide global vouchers to buyers, the buyer could take the voucher and redeem it at a reseller that is in a territory outside of where the buyer is located. If this is done, it is possible that the producer can be seen as providing incentives to buyers that are injuring the reseller that is losing the sales. Doing this would allow resellers to free ride on the time and money expended by other resellers to market, advertise, and promote the products within their own territory, thereby penalizing some resellers by having them expend the money and not make the sale within their territory and may cause problems within the producers distribution system. For example, a producer may provide buyers with vouchers that are redeemable for a cash discount of the sale price of a product without any restriction as to where the voucher can be redeemed. The buyers in Illinois that receive these vouchers decide to go to the reseller in Wisconsin rather than the reseller in Illinois to redeem the vouchers because the reseller in Wisconsin has a lower sale price than the reseller in Illinois. However, since the cost of doing business for the reseller in Illinois is more expensive than that of the reseller in Wisconsin, the reseller in Illinois cannot sell the product for as low a price as the reseller in Wisconsin without losing money on each sale. Therefore, although the reseller in Illinois has spent time and money developing the Illinois market, buyers are going to Wisconsin to redeem the vouchers. In this case, the Illinois reseller may see the producer as undermining its efforts to sell products in Illinois and decide that it no longer wants to sell producers products thereby leaving the producers with no distribution in Illinois.
The net result is that producers that sell products within distribution systems are currently constrained from effectively marketing, advertising, and promoting products over the Internet using the most effective buying incentive at their disposal: a specific monetary incentive for the products they sell.